Sunday, May 29, 2016

A blown glass work produced in an edition of approximately twelve copies, each unique. The above copy is in the collection of the Walker Art Centre.

"You take your tube, dip the end of the tube into the glass and you get a gob there - it's still hot, it's still fluid, it's still plasma - and then you start to blow into that and turn it. You turn the pipe and you heat it up a little and you turn it a little more and then it's pretty well set up like a dumpling and then you cut it off and then it's an entity"

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Amy Park's exhibition at the Kopeikin Gallery closes a week from today, on June 4th. The show features Park's precisely rendered watercolour replications of the panels from Ruscha's seminal 1966 bookwork. The 54 paintings total 97 feet and wrap the gallery.

In 2012, Café Royal Books produced Birchall's Photograph Converted into Base64 Code in an edition of 100 copies, as part of their publishing award.A photograph of a sculpture, made as part of an installation, converted into Base64 code, a binary-to-text encoding scheme that represents binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation.

For this follow-up title, Birchall worked with Morse Code society members, to translate the digital code of a photographic image file into Morse Code. Developed in 1836 by Samuel Morse, Morse Code served as an alphabet for the electrical telegraph system, which had to transmit language using only pulses and the silence between them.

It subsequently became used with both light and sound and mine rescues have even employed pulling on a rope to communicate - a short pull for a dot and a long pull for a dash.When written, the alphabet is represented with dots, dashes and spaces, as per the below chart.

Birchall and the society members translated the photographic file into 98 pages of Morse code. Alongside the printed book, on a micro SD card, is a 44 hour audio version, which as he says “if you used as your ringtone, you’d be the coolest person in town”.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Martin Creed will release his new album Thoughts Lined Up through Telephone Records on the 8th of July. Recorded at ArtSpace, Brixton, the album will be available on LP, Limited Edition LP, CD and as a download. The record features 24 songs but clocks in at only 43 minutes.

The video for the first single, "Understanding" was released this week. The song shares the same title as the recently unveiled sculpture Understanding (Work no. 2630), a 25 foot tall rotating neon. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, the work is on view until October 23 at Pier 6, Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York.

"I want to be understood," says Creed, "That’s what everybody wants".

Watch the video for Understanding at the Guardian newspaper's site, here. The previously streamed Let's Come To An Arrangement, can be heard here.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

This week on Tumblr: album covers designed by Andy Warhol (The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, John Cale, John Lennon, Aretha Franklin, Moondog, Count Basie, etc.) and album covers that incorporated Warhol's graphics (The Smiths, Debbie Harry).

A 1988 letter from Lawrence Weiner to Robert C. Morgan, from the collection currently being offered by Granary Books (see below post).

A follow-up to a telephone conversation, the letter accepts an invitation to participate in an exhibition ("Nostalgia sucks. We should concentrate on the relation of what was to what is") and apologizes that Weiner's Amsterdam boat could not accommodate Morgan as a guest ("you would be practically in our laps").

Included are many much-coveted artists' books, such as Michael Snow's Cover to Cover, Ruscha's Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, Jan Dibbets' Robin Redbreast’s Territory and John Baldessari's Fable. Other highlights include Art-Language journals, Seth Seigelaub publications and cassettes containing interviews Morgan conducted. These include conversations with Marina Abromović, Baldessari, Barry, Haacke, Huebler, Kaprow, Komar and Melamid, Kosuth, Lucy Lippard, Ruscha, Siegelaub, Snow, Bernar Venet, John Weber, and Weiner. Many of them have never been transcribed.

"Robert C. Morgan (b. 1943) is an internationally renowned American art critic, art historian, curator, lecturer, poet, and painter. He completed his dissertation, "The Role of Documentation in Conceptual Art: An Aesthetic Inquiry," at New York University (School of Education) in 1978. It was the first dissertation on Conceptual art in the U.S. and was later rewritten, updated and published as Conceptual Art: An American Perspective (McFarland & Company, 1994).

The present collection springs from Morgan's assiduous research and writing, and provides copious evidence of and discerning insight into the enduring phenomenon of Conceptual art, with particular attention to Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, Peter Downsbrough, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Seth Siegelaub, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, and Ed Ruscha, to name a few. The collection includes artists' books, monographs, catalogs, cards, posters, recordings, correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, and so forth, and represents the work of more than 100 artists, writers, curators, and editors."

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Floriography is a means of cryptological communication through the use of flower arrangements. Often called "the language of flowers", the practice dates back thousands of years, and peaked in popularity in the 19th century. Sentiments that could perhaps not be spoken aloud in Victoria society were expressed through gifts of blooms, plants, and precise floral arrangements. The recipient would decode the message through the use of floral dictionaries.

Hundreds of these volumes were produced in the England, France, the US, Belgium, Germany and South America. The inconsistencies in their content presumably led to some mistranslations, the consequences of which could be somewhat grave, given the range of emotions expressed. The Tiger Lily, for example, signifies "pride" but the Orange Lily "dislike". A White Rose means "I am worthy of you", but a dried White Rose indicates "death before dishonour".

Azoulay's beautifully produced volume compiles hundreds of examples sourced from a variety of historic texts. They are illustrated with eleven full-page colour photographs by the artist. The information is arranged alphabetically, first by plant name, and again by emotion.

The book is available in Canada from Art Metropole, here, for $24.00 CDN, and from the artist, here, for $18.00 US.

This week Azoulay announced the Floriography Jacket, a collaborative project with fashion designer George McCracken. Made to order in an edition of ten, the jacket is available in both men's and women's styles. It can be purchased here, for $375 US, and comes with a copy of the bookwork.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.